Why Trump’s meeting with Putin could become a pure photo shoot

There are moments when Donald Trump is just an old man who remembers.

“Look, here is the king. This is Charles with his guard. And that is the queen, Queen Elizabeth,” says the old man and taps on the full -page photo. The younger man in the seat next to him looks adequately impressed. How to do it when grandfather tells. “Who already has such pictures?” Asks the old man without wanting to answer. Of course nobody. Because nobody is like him.

The scene from the document, which is accompanied by right-wing influencers Tucker Carlson, is the art of the art of the upswing with melancholy-triggering, transcendent sounds. But she also shows what Donald Trump really matters: on the pictures. On the fact that others see him as he sees himself.

A few months later, the old man is President of the United States of America. Again. And again he is hunting for memories, after pictures that stay. And a few more months later, this Friday, he could decide that the shape loves so much more than the content and the fate of a people that is not of its.

Does the most important polite event of this summer, the Ukraine sheet with invasor Vladimir Putin, get to the mere photo shoot?

Already almost half a century ago, Donald Trump staged himself as the world driver he was supposed to be. In a photo from 1980, for example, he sits in the navy -like custom suit in the skeleton of the Trump Tower, which has just been created. The striking ridge hairstyle perfectly drapes under a guaranteed virgin, high -gloss polished security helmet, the view of the sky – an invitation for every metaphor that is still so worn out.

On another picture recorded three years later for the magazine “Manhattan Inc”, he gently holds a white deaf in his hands. His expression, probably his interpretation of pure innocence, almost lasciviously. In the associated article, he dreams of his role as a peace bringer in the Middle East.

There are dozens of such pictures, many somehow absurd, all somehow oversized. Loud still lifes of success: How Trump presses a million dollars in cash as he swings the golf club in his office, as he gives the strong man in the wrestling ring, as he grins in the middle of beauty queens. Apply fat, collect fat.

The empire he took over from his father rested on concrete. The empire to which he expanded it on his image. Effect and cause, according to the recipe for success. There were and are dozens of entrepreneurs who surpass him, in intelligence, money, influence. But no name stands so much for success. Donald J. Trump is not a man, that’s a brand. And a brand that has to be advertised.

On the Flickr platform, on which the official photographers of the White House publish their material, Joe Biden, 10,000 in eight years, did not even meet 7,000 pictures in eight years. Trump’s Cheffotographer Daniel Torok and his colleagues have – since January. “It is like watching the set of a reality TV show with Donald Trump in the leading role,” writes Pete Souza, Torok’s predecessor during Ronald Reagan and later under Barack Obama. Souza thinks it is striking that Trump always deals with Trump. Even, when he honors injured war veterans, he focuses on the pictures. “It’s about him, not about her.”

Yes, Trump likes to be staged by professionals. In the end, however, he always directs himself. There is this video snippet that says so much about him. In it, Trump loses himself in preparation for an interview about the exact positioning of a glass of water:

While the scene appears to be lovingly quirky and/or in love with detail, Trump unexcitedly shows his addiction, his urge to have to stand in the front row: literally: literally:

Anyone who had doubts about Trump’s championship lost it on July 13, 2024 at the latest. Seconds after a shooter hit him on his right ear during an campaign appearance, he stretches his right fist up, his lips shapes recognizably “fights! Fight! Fight!”! ” A stroke of genius. Anyone who thinks of the external impact after being shot, does it from reflex, cannot help it. He serves an addiction, with himself – and with the audience.

It was this inimitable feeling that Trump brought to the White House in 2017. And thanks to the 34 guilt sayings and in November 2024, the most impressive comeback in American political history succeeded.

Trump, the reality TV star, lives from and for the big appearance. As in summer 2019, when he quickly crossed the border line at a meeting with North Korea’s dictator Kim Jong-Un in the demilitarized zone to the south and took a few historical steps to the north. Absolutely nothing has changed afterwards. Korea is still divided, Kim continues to threaten the red button. But the pictures that stay.

No isolated case. This would be the less sustainable Abraham Agreement between Israel and the Arab countries, which is ultimately quite irrelevant trade agreements to terminate the trade war with China or the declaration of intent between the Armenia and Azerbaijanism that was incorrectly sold as a peace agreement last week. Large gestures, small effect.

Trump’s coercion of wearing his self -awareness to the outside world, ironically, makes him frugal. This also applies to the summit on Friday. That the meeting with the Kremlin boss takes place at all, that Putin to him comes, it is enough. After all, this pays the brand, everything else is encore. Putin knows that. He knows Trump because he thinks he knows men like Trump. Moscow is full of them. If the Kremlin chief were really interested in a deal, he would have asked the European leaders, but at least the Ukraine.

No, Putin primarily wants to buy time. And he will get it as long as he fulfills his heart’s desire to come: the perfect photo for the album.